Vendôme Chef Joachim Wissler Is New German Cuisine's Poster Child

Schweinebraten, or roast pork, is the holy grail of German cuisine. Done right, it is a hearty mélange of sweet and savory, tender and crunchy, a perfect foil for side dishes like cabbage and dumplings. Done wrong, it is chewy and tasteless, a rubbery mound that grows larger with every bite. Over the years, I have had just about every kind, from celestial to execrable, but until a recent lunch at Vendôme, the acclaimed three-star Michelin restaurant on the outskirts of Cologne, I had never had the ghostly kind.

The first apparition came in a trout course, served with a halo of red-cabbage foam, meant to recall Schweinebraten's classic accompaniment and foreshadow what was to come. Then, in an Asian-fusion dish titled "Goose Liver," a quadrangle of slowly cooked piglet, its skin as light and crunchy as a sheet of seaweed, played second fiddle to panfried foie gras in a soy-sauce glaze. Finally, the piglet got its own course, served with mint-laced pea purée and a beer soufflé, aerie riffs on Schweinebraten sidekicks mashed peas, bread dumplings, and beer stein.

ENLARGE

Chef Joachim Wissler
Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg

The menu managed to go in many other directions, elegantly deconstructing a host of German staples, including müsli-laced candy bars (re-imagined as a crackerlike base for an appetizer), and pan-European German favorites like gazpacho (made here with melon). Throw in some red-lentil rolls and a saffron ice-cream bar, and you get a world of tastes that harnesses a very German longing for both the exotic and the familiar. This isn't just food; it is anthropology—a cultural cardiogram of Germanness that analyzes those fraternal twins, wanderlust and inwardness.

Vendôme—now a fixture on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, compiled annually by the U.K.'s Restaurant magazine—is the creation of a farmer's son, and Germany's chef of the moment, Joachim Wissler. A native of Baden-Württemberg, trained in the food-friendly rustic environs of southwestern Germany, Mr. Wissler, 49 years old, has become a poster child for "neue deutsche Küche," or new German cuisine, the country's 21st-century bid for culinary greatness, which looks up to French tradition, down into German memory, and steals a sideways glance or two at Spanish and Nordic inventiveness.

In May, Mr. Wissler was named Germany's "chef of chefs" by 100 fellow food professionals.

"Everything influenced me," says Mr. Wissler, speaking last month in his office, located, like Vendôme itself, in an outlying building of an 18th-century hilltop castle, Schloss Bensberg, now a luxury hotel. "Food is like cars," he says, when asked how his cooking reflects national and international trends. "When an innovation comes along," he says, "it is adopted by everyone."

Vendôme's approach sums up three or four decades of German dining habits, from nouvelle cuisine, which won German converts in the 1970s and '80s, to the so-called Mediterranean wave in the '90s, which put olive oil in many German kitchens for the first time. The red-cabbage foam suggests the fun-filled pyrotechnics of molecular cuisine. And a recent German interest in Asian cooking shows up not only in the food, but also in the wine pairings. The foie gras dish, which might benefit from a German dessert wine, is matched up perfectly with plum-infused sake. Tasting menus range between €110 and €230; wine pairings top out at €110.

Mr. Wissler sees his mission as twofold: "provoke" diners with "something they haven't eaten before," but also "remind" them of the food from their past. A good example is his 2010 adaptation of Halver Hahn, Cologne argot for a cheese sandwich. Vendôme's version comforts with the name but goads with ingredients like Brie de Meaux and winter truffles.

Many of the world's great chefs have learned from each other, and it has long been common to start a culinary career traveling the world in search of stints in the back kitchens of top restaurants. Mr. Wissler, by contrast, is a product of Germany's apprentice system, which regulates the training of everyone from plumbers to violin makers. He can sound more impressed with his "master" status—the highest level in the apprentice hierarchy—than with his Michelin stars. "I'm a craftsman," he says.

His interest in food dates back to his childhood on a dairy farm southeast of Stuttgart, where his chores included peeling potatoes for the farm's adjoining restaurant. Raised on classic dishes like Maultaschen, a German-style ravioli, and the farm's own homemade yogurt, he veered toward sophistication with exposure to French techniques at a hotel in the Black Forest, where he started his training. He had great success in the 1990s at a restaurant in a castle hotel in the Rheingau region, near Frankfurt, where he won two Michelin stars and garnered the attention of German hotel and restaurant impresario Thomas Althoff, who invited him to open a new restaurant on the grounds of Schloss Bensberg in 2000. Some four years later, Vendôme had won its third Michelin star.

Located in Bergisch Gladbach, a medium-size city that forms part of greater Cologne, the castle can seem frozen in time—its splendid courtyard reminded Mr. Wissler of the grandeur of Paris's Place Vendôme, the restaurant's namesake. But just beyond the gates is the sprawl of Germany's great megalopolis, which stretches along the Rhine and Ruhr rivers and includes Cologne, Düsseldorf, and the industrial cities of Essen and Dortmund.

"Germany is an industrial country," says Mr. Wissler, who notes he cannot take the locavore route favored by so many chefs these days because German agriculture cannot offer him consistently high-quality ingredients. Luckily, France is only a few hours away, and the best French foie gras has become a signature ingredient at the restaurant.

"Mr. Wissler made pork respectable," says Thomas Althoff, owner and chief executive of the Cologne-based Althoff Hotel and Gourmet Collection. But Mr. Althoff, who says he eats at Vendôme around 10 times a year, never misses a chance to try the latest foie gras creation. One of his favorites: Goose Liver Snow, a 2006 recipe, served with a green apple and licorice sauce, and shaved black truffles. "It's super," he says.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.